


Smoke Rises

by lucymonster



Series: Force Bonds Work in Mysterious Ways [2]
Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Kylo Ren is Not Nice, M/M, Multi, Pre-Relationship, That's Not How The Force Works, Trick or Treat: Trick
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-08
Updated: 2019-11-08
Packaged: 2021-01-15 21:07:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21259664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lucymonster/pseuds/lucymonster
Summary: In an attempt to sever the Force bond, Rey accidentally expands it to include Finn as well.Kylo is used to having other people in his head. But he’s not used to being outnumbered.





	Smoke Rises

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ambiguously](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ambiguously/gifts).

‘Leave me,’ Kylo tells his servant droid. The bath in his quarters isn’t yet drawn and the dinner on the table is still cold and vacuum sealed. But it’s been a long day full of meetings and tension, and he craves at least the illusion of privacy, even if the real thing is still out of reach.

‘Are you talking to us?’ says a voice he’d rather not hear right now. ‘Because you know we can’t–’

‘Not you,’ says Kylo through gritted teeth. He sits down, extracts the main course of his rations from their wrapping and starts to eat, paying no attention to which flavour of protein-rich mush he lucked into tonight. His unwanted guests look on in rare, merciful and doubtless short-lived silence.

It’s been several weeks now since Rey, in a reckless attempt to sever their connection in the Force, accidentally expanded it to encompass a whole new member. Finn grates on Kylo’s nerves in a way that Rey by herself never did. _ Galling _hardly captures the experience of finding himself bound in mind and soul to a powerless nobody – not a Jedi, not a descendant of Sith royalty, but a weak-willed traitor whose main contribution to the war effort has been running away from every fight. His involvement shouldn’t even be possible, since he’s roughly as Force-sensitive as Kylo’s left sock. 

Kylo is still trying to make Rey tell him exactly what she did to create the new bond. When he’s not busy trying to keep his galaxy safe from terrorists and his dinners safe from interruptions, he’s been doing his own research, but there’s virtually no evidence on these kinds of Force phenomena. They’re in uncharted space and no one but Kylo seems to care about plotting a new course.

‘Anyway,’ Rey says, not to Kylo. That’s another thing that galls: with the bond split three ways, it’s easy for two members to gang up on the third. Or ignore him. ‘I think Kira’s lying to Seth. I think it’s actually Klo’shak’s baby, from that fling they had last season.’

It would be inane enough if it were social gossip. Kylo knows for a fact that they’re discussing _ Far and Away, _ a frothy serial holonet drama that’s been running since before he was born. He’s had his aides watch all of it and brief him on the key points, on the slender off-chance that Rey and Finn have been using well-known character names to pass tactical messages under his nose. So far the only intel he’s gleaned is that Kira is a compulsive non-monogamist and the Resistance have too much time on their hands.

He’s working on that. Any day now the First Order’s trackers will pick up a lead on their location, and when they do, it won’t matter whose baby Kira is pregnant with. Kylo will have wiped their meagre fleet from existence by the time the season finale airs. 

‘Can Klo’shak even impregnate a human?’ counters Finn, very earnestly. ‘I don’t think he’s biologically compatible. The fling was a dark moment for Kira and Seth’s marriage, but I don’t think it’s going to have any lasting fallout.’

Kylo eats his protein mush and wishes that, if he must feel so alone, he could at least enjoy the luxury of _ being _alone. It’s all he wants from either of them.

* * *

The new connection isn’t a stable one. Kylo often meets Rey by herself, their minds finding each other’s out of habit; less often, and less comfortably, he finds himself face to face with only Finn. Kylo is proud to say that he’s never been one to put his ego above his curiosity. Presented with the chance of learning something new about the Force, he’s willing to look past the cosmic insult and focus instead on teasing out the ways in which their bond is different from his and Rey’s.

For the first while he thinks Finn’s lack of innate Force sensitivity must be muffling his emotions and making them harder to access than the electric pulse of Rey’s that Kylo can put his thumb on whenever he chooses. It takes him a few of their one-on-one encounters to realise that the feeling he thinks of as purely his own is in fact a perfect mirror of Finn’s: injured pride. Finn is indignant about their new connection. For reasons that presumably make perfect sense to his limited mind, he thinks himself above it.

‘I wouldn’t have expected a stormtrooper to care so much about his privacy,’ Kylo tells a glaring Finn one day. His own inner sanctum has had a revolving door since the first time Snoke stepped through it at some point during his infancy – he can’t remember far enough back to recall a time when his mind was completely clean of other people’s fingerprints. Rey, lonely and desperate for belonging, had leaned into their bond from the very start even as she tried to pretend she was pulling away. But Finn’s contempt for the process is quite sincere. 

As evidenced by his answer in full: ‘Get lost, Ren.’

‘Why is the Force working through you like this? You don’t have the strength to support it by yourself, but I’m not doing it and I don’t think Rey is either. Not on purpose – not since the first time.’

‘The first time wasn’t on purpose either,’ says Finn. Try as he might, Kylo hasn’t been able to persuade Rey to tell him what she did that caused their bond to start including Finn as well.

(‘I could help you undo it,’ he’s tried to reason. ‘But first I need to know what’s been done.’ Her answer never changes: for all she knows, he’ll use the new technique to start invading others’ minds at leisure. It’s a grossly unfair suspicion. Kylo already has all the mind-invading techniques he needs. This one, with its unwanted intimacy and unpredictable ebbs and flows, he’s as motivated to get rid of as she is.)

‘You also don’t have the strength to shield yourself from me,’ Kylo goes on, in what he feels is a perfectly fair and factual tone. It’s Finn’s problem if he takes it as a threat. ‘You can’t make it stop just by wishing me away. So we might as well talk.'

'What do you want to talk to me for?' says Finn, with obvious bitterness. 'Whatever you want to know, you can just reach inside my head and take.'

It's a frustrating exaggeration. What Kylo _ wants _is the location of the Resistance ghost fleet; what he gets instead is an erratic stream of emotions and impulses with the occasional more solid image that he lacks the context to understand. He knows Finn and Rey are currently planetbound, because he's seen flashes of sky while he watches the vacuum and tasted lungfuls of fresh outdoor air while he breathes artificial atmo. He’s felt things he doesn’t want to feel – forgotten, rusty old things that he knows belong to them because he banished them from his own heart long ago. The longer the bond goes on, the more contamination has the chance to build up.

It was easier to resist when it was only Rey. Kylo is used to having other people in his head, but he’s not used to being outnumbered.

* * *

As an experiment, he reaches out when his aides bring news that the anti-regime protests on Ventooine have been crushed. He pores over holos of rubble and wills the Force to share this stark proof of his military might. They’ll see it in a few hours anyway, when the propaganda bureau announces the good news that the agents of chaos are once again retreating. They might as well see it first through his eyes.

The images in his briefing packet aren’t the sanitised ones that feed into public broadcasts. Smoke rises from the husks of shelled-out buildings. There are corpses on display, lying mangled and bloody in the wreckage of their makeshift barricades. 

Some of them look young.

Kylo sends the vision across his bond with Rey and Finn, and receives back … horror. Panic. Nausea.

Interesting, he thinks, as he leans over the sink and takes gulping breaths to settle his stomach. Very interesting.

* * *

The nightmares start around the same time as the launch of the Order’s much-anticipated next foray into a hitherto untamed quarter of Wild Space. The planets and populations who’ve been holding out against the rule of law now face a simple choice as the fleet advances: to submit, or to serve as an example to their neighbours. This isn’t a strategy of Kylo’s devising, but he signed it off without much thought or prick of conscience. It’s how things have always been done. How they _ must _be done, if the war is ever to end.

His generals tell him their Star Destroyers have breached the Drexel front with rebel casualties in the millions. His aides tell him Seth has started to suspect Kira’s infidelity and is getting ready to file for divorce. 

Partway through his sleep cycle, he wakes short of breath with wet hair plastered to his face. He remembers his dream in disjointed images: fallen bodies, screams, explosions. Dreary, everyday kinds of things. Hardly worth sweating over.

‘If you’re trying to show me the error of my ways, it won’t work,’ he tells the darkness.

‘I wouldn’t expect it to,’ says Rey. ‘That was your nightmare, Kylo, not mine or Finn’s. Don’t try to blame it on us.’

Finn sounds less composed. His voice is ragged as he says: ‘There were kids on that planet.’

By sheer force of will, Kylo masters his breathing. ‘I know. Despicable, isn’t it? Their parents knew the inevitable consequences of rebellion, but they chose their actions anyway and condemned their children to death in the process. I’ll never understand the mindset.’

The darkness doesn’t answer, but he feels a wave of powerful disgust. It feels good, obviously. Their distress means he’s winning.

* * *

The prize? More nightmares.

Typical.

‘I can help you end this,’ Kylo tells Rey after yet another night of horrifying visions. ‘Just tell me the ritual you used to recreate the bond. If I can understand that, maybe I can figure out an antidote.’

‘Antidote?’ Rey scoffs. ‘We’re not poison.’

They feel like poison. His mind and limbs are heavy with it.

But Kylo adapts, in the same way he has always adapted to pain. A theory emerges: suffering is a source of power in the dark side, but repetition and overexposure tend to numb the effects over time. He’s learned it from his work in the interrogation chambers. He’s learned it from his own gruelling training, putting himself through more and more until agony feels like a second skin. By drawing on the anguish of two people who don't share his resilience, can he access greater strength? 

He embraces the nightmares. Fuels them with his vast memory bank of cities razed and lives destroyed. He dwells on the terrible things he’s done – things he’s been willing, _ proud _to do – and blows them out into the Force like dandelion seeds to find their home in a connected mind. Finn and Rey can’t take anything from Kylo without his cooperation, not at this distance. But he can choose to share his thoughts. They can choose to send back their horror and sadness.

Novel emotions. Things he doesn’t feel; things he has transcended the need to feel.

Rey appears alone one day while he’s dwelling in lavish detail on the massacre at Tehar. Not his cleanest or most subtle effort, that operation, but stunningly effective. Snoke had been pleased. ‘Are you having a nervous breakdown?’ she asks by way of greeting, conversational with a touch of steel. ‘I swear, each time I touch your mind, it’s grimmer than the last. It would do you good to stop thinking about gore and butchery all the time.’

‘Of course I’m not having a breakdown,’ Kylo snaps, offended. He’d have thought it would be obvious he’s sending these thoughts to torment her and Finn. ‘I’m offering you a warning. A little preview of what happens once I find your fleet.’

Underneath her scornful bravado, he senses a tangle of painful emotions: sharp fear, sick shame, grief for the bloodshed. She’s covering them well but they’re definitely her emotions, because they can’t be _ his _and there’s no one else around to feel them. ‘You’re not scary, Kylo, not to me. You’re pathetic. And if you’re really obsessing over your crimes on purpose then you need to find a new hobby. Winding me and Finn up with jump scares won’t get you any closer to galactic domination.’

‘Where is Finn?’ Right now, Kylo can’t sense him at all. Not even in the background. ‘Have you finally figured out how to get rid of him?’

‘I’m not trying to get rid of Finn,’ says Rey. ‘You’ll know when I’ve figured out how to break the bond, because you’ll be the one cut off.’

It doesn’t work like that. Kylo’s sure it doesn’t. For one thing, he was here first.

* * *

He meditates on burning corpses, and they watch the next episode of _ Far and Away_. ‘You might as well surrender,’ he tells them. ‘Your continued existence puts everyone around you at risk. You have to know that whoever lets you dock your ships or fuel your tanks is guilty of treason and doomed to execution.’

‘I think Kira has to tell Seth,’ says Finn. ‘She can’t keep her affair a secret forever, no matter what the consequences.’

‘I don’t think it’s herself she’s worried about,’ says Rey. ‘When he finds out, Seth’s going to beat Klo’shak to a pulp. We’ve seen how nasty his temper can get.’

‘Isn’t the episode over yet?’ Kylo demands.

‘It’s a double-length special. Would you mind piping down? The ad break just ended and Sandra’s about to visit Grish in prison for the first time since his unlicensed carry conviction.’

* * *

Gradually, the nightmares evolve. He tries to stand on the fields of past battles and gaze upon his murderous handiwork, but his unconscious mind goes rogue and starts unearthing other, less comfortable horrors he’d rather have stayed buried. Embarrassing scenes from the life of a child long since dead and replaced. Arguments with Snoke and the times Kylo learned what torture feels like from the other side of the power imbalance. Made-up visions of Chandrila burning (he’s never launched an assault on that planet – there’s never been a need). Stories about his grandfather that he’s pieced together from salvaged records.

‘This is getting weird,’ Finn says next time he interrupts one of Kylo’s scheduled meal breaks. ‘Forget what Rey said, can you go back to dreaming about your favourite murders?’

‘Sure,’ says Kylo. ‘Just for you, I’ll dredge up Tuanul.’

He tries to dream of the burning village and the smoke that rises up around stormtrooper FN-2187 and his fallen comrades. Instead, Kylo dreams of Rey saying _ you’ll be the one cut off _ on repeat with increasing vitriol and in increasingly outlandish settings. She rejects him on the frozen plains of Hoth and in the bowels of a scavenged Star Destroyer. She rejects him underwater while he struggles for the surface, and high up in the air as his disabled starfighter hurtles at the ground Sometimes Finn’s there as well, and the two of them reject him in chorus. _ I don’t care, _ he tells them on the rare occasions the dream grants him enough breath to speak. _ Cut me off, do it right now. Hand me the knife and I’ll help you._

The dream changes again. There’s a knife in Rey’s hand, ready to sever, but she passes it to Finn. Finn says, _ I told you I’m not going to kill for the First Order, _ and puts it down.

In unison, they reach out their hands. _ You’ll be the one cut off, _ they repeat – not a threat, not a rejection, but a warning full of sorrow and concern. Something inside Kylo aches, and he knows it’s some trick of the bond, because the things that the ache cries out for to soothe it aren’t things he could ever desire or allow.

‘That was the strangest dream yet,’ he says to the darkness when he jolts awake.

The darkness doesn’t answer. He can feel the bond slumbering away in the background, but it’s not awake now – the dream is his alone.

* * *

'I get it now,’ he hears Finn say. He and Rey are nowhere to be seen, but their voices drift into his mind from out of nowhere and Kylo knows they must be talking about him. ‘He’s a psychopath, but watching him self-destruct like this … _ we’d _have to be psychopaths not to feel it just a little.’

‘I know,’ says Rey. ‘But learn from my mistakes, Finn, there’s nothing anyone can do. It’s not only himself he wants to destroy. Until we find a way to cut the bond, we just have to do our best to stay outside his blast radius.’

They’ve got it all backwards. Kylo isn’t self-destructing – he’s stronger than he’s ever been, sitting on his hard-won throne with the galaxy spread out like a banquet before him. He could laugh at their naivete in projecting their own weak feelings onto him.

He’s not in a laughing mood, is the thing. But that's not because it isn't funny.

‘You’re right,’ Finn says to Rey. ‘I know you’re right. But sharing all this stuff with him is messing with my head. I just wish–’

* * *

_ I wish it were different. _

The words could belong to anyone. Or no one. Kylo doesn’t bother trying to trace them back to the speaker. Finn had the right idea in the first place: this ridiculous three-way bond is worthy of nothing but contempt. The sooner it ends, the better off they’ll be.

* * *

The season finale of _ Far and Away _airs. ‘Leave me,’ Kylo tells his servant droid. ‘Retire for the night,’ he tells his aides. They can watch it and take notes from the comfort of their quarters. Here in his own, he’ll get a headstart on tomorrow’s briefing.

Cheesy theme music fills the room, and with it comes the sound of two people breathing. ‘I swear to god, Ren,’ says Finn after a beat, ‘if you talk through Kira’s big reveal I’m going to find a way to kill you.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ Kylo says, shooting for ironic. He’s aware it sounds strained. He feels off tonight, in a way he can’t quite put his finger on. Maybe it’s all the weeks of interrupted sleep catching up to him.

The theme song ends. On screen, a long dramatic pause ensues as Seth makes his way up Klo’shak’s driveway to confront him.

‘You might as well sit down,’ says Rey at last.

He does. They watch the episode together, all three of them, like it’s something they do every day. Like there’s any reason in the world for Kylo to be part of their strange, brainless downtime ritual.

It turns out that Kira’s baby _ is _Seth’s, but it’s also Klo’shak’s – his people reproduce through a method of DNA-splicing that Kylo is fairly sure has never been observed in any species in the galaxy. Once they realise their shared paternity, the two men forget about their differences in favour of uniting as a big happy family. There’s a three-way embrace full of sobbing and promises.

‘Ren,’ says Finn, and for once – for the first time Kylo has ever heard it – his voice doesn’t sound angry. ‘You’re crying.’

‘No, I’m not.’

But he is. And he doesn’t know why. And he doesn’t know how to make it stop.

**Author's Note:**

> After the rain comes the rainbow! There's a porny sequel: [If You Just Gave In](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21259718).


End file.
